Muscle Groups and Movement Patterns: What Do You Actually Need to Train?

The human body contains hundreds of muscles.

Fortunately, you don't need to learn all their names before you're allowed to pick up a dumbbell.

For most people who simply want to become stronger, fitter and more capable, it's much more useful to understand the major muscle groups and the movements they help you perform.

That's how I generally approach training.

Rather than trying to individually train hundreds of muscles, we can organise exercises around a handful of fundamental movement patterns.

Get reasonably strong across those movements and you'll train an enormous amount of your body without needing a degree in anatomy.

Your Muscles Work Together

Very few exercises genuinely use one muscle in isolation.

Your muscles work together to produce movement and stabilise your body.

Take a squat.

Your quads are working.

Your glutes are working.

Your hamstrings contribute.

Your trunk helps control your torso.

Your feet, calves and hips all play a role.

That's why I generally find it more useful for clients to think about movements first and individual muscles second.

You don't need to consciously contract every muscle involved.

Your nervous system is quite capable of organising most of that without you micromanaging it.

What is useful is understanding roughly what an exercise is supposed to achieve and what good execution looks like.

Do You Need to “Balance” Every Muscle?

You'll often hear fitness advice about muscle imbalances, poor posture and supposedly dormant muscles.

There's usually a grain of truth buried underneath it, but it's easy to take too far.

If you spend all day sitting down, it doesn't mean your glutes have forgotten how to work.

Likewise, having one muscle stronger than another doesn't automatically mean you're going to get injured.

Human beings aren't perfectly symmetrical.

However, regularly exposing your body to a variety of movements, loads and ranges of motion is a sensible way to develop well-rounded physical capacity.

That's what we're trying to achieve.

Not perfect muscular symmetry.

A body that's strong and useful in lots of different situations.

Compound vs Isolation Exercises

You'll also hear exercises divided into two broad categories.

Compound Exercises

A compound exercise involves movement at multiple joints and usually requires several muscle groups to work together.

Examples include:

Squats
Deadlifts
Bench Press
Overhead Press
Pull-Ups
Rows
Lunges

These exercises can be very time-efficient because a relatively small number of movements can train a large proportion of your body.

That's why compound exercises form a significant part of many strength programmes.

Isolation Exercises

An isolation exercise attempts to emphasise a particular muscle or joint action.

Examples include:

Biceps Curls
Triceps Extensions
Leg Extensions
Hamstring Curls
Calf Raises
Lateral Raises

Isolation exercises aren't just for rehabilitation or correcting an imbalance.

They're useful whenever we want to give a particular muscle more training without necessarily creating the fatigue or complexity of another large compound exercise.

They can be useful for building muscle, developing specific areas, managing training load or simply because you enjoy doing them.

There's room for both.

The Main Movement Patterns

For general strength training, I like to think about a few broad categories.

They aren't laws of human movement and plenty of exercises overlap between them.

They're simply a useful way of organising your training.

PUSHING

A push involves using the upper body to move yourself or an external resistance away.

Main muscles involved

Chest
Shoulders
Triceps

Examples

Bench Press
Press-Ups
Dips
Overhead Press
Dumbbell Press

We can further divide these into horizontal pushes, such as a bench press, and vertical pushes, such as an overhead press.

You don't necessarily need to worry about that distinction as a beginner.

Just get good at pushing things.

PULLING

Pulling involves bringing an external resistance towards you—or pulling yourself towards something.

Main muscles involved

Upper back
Lats
Biceps
Forearms

Examples

Pull-Ups
Chin-Ups
Ring Rows
Bent-Over Rows
Cable Rows

Again, we can broadly divide these into horizontal and vertical pulling.

Pulling is also where grip strength starts becoming particularly important.

If you're working towards your first pull-up, I've got a complete first pull-up programme elsewhere in this glossary.

SQUATTING

Squatting involves significant movement through the knees and hips and is one of our fundamental lower-body patterns.

Main muscles involved

Quadriceps
Glutes
Adductors, alongside several other muscles contributing to the movement.

Examples

Back Squat
Front Squat
Goblet Squat
Split Squat
Lunges
Step-Ups

Different exercises and techniques will change how much work individual muscles contribute.

You don't need every squat variation.

You need one or two appropriate ones that you can progressively train.

HINGING

A hinge involves producing movement predominantly through the hips.

Main muscles involved

Glutes
Hamstrings
Back and trunk musculature

Examples

Deadlift
Romanian Deadlift
Good Morning
Kettlebell Swing

Learning to hinge is particularly useful because it gives us access to an enormous range of exercises—from controlled Romanian deadlifts to picking up awkward objects from the floor.

And I quite like picking up awkward objects from the floor.

CARRYING

I'd actually add this to your original article.

Loaded carries don't fit particularly neatly into push/pull/squat/hinge, and they're a significant part of how you actually coach.

Muscles involved

Lots of them.

That's rather the point.

Examples

Farmer's Walks
Suitcase Carries
Sandbag Carries
Front Carries
Overhead Carries

Carries challenge your grip, trunk, legs and upper body while requiring you to actually move through space with a load.

They're simple, scalable and incredibly useful.

They're also a good example of why trying to assign every exercise to one muscle can become silly.

Sometimes your entire body just needs to get something heavy from A to B.

YOUR TRUNK

I generally prefer trunk to “core”, although everyone knows what core means.

Your trunk musculature helps produce and control movement between your pelvis and ribcage and transfer force throughout your body.

And it does considerably more than just create a six-pack.

Examples of trunk training include:

Planks
Side Planks
Hollow Holds
Rollouts
Loaded Carries
Rotational exercises

Heavy squats, deadlifts, carries and awkward-object exercises also place considerable demands on your trunk.

GRIP

Your hands are your connection to whatever you're lifting.

If your grip fails, the rest of you doesn't get much opportunity to demonstrate how strong it is.

Grip is trained during:

Deadlifts
Pull-Ups
Rows
Farmer's Walks
Sandbag work
Stone lifting

And we can train it directly when necessary.

As someone who spends a fairly unreasonable amount of time lifting stones and carrying heavy things, I'm particularly fond of having strong hands.

CALVES

Don't forget them.

Your calves contribute to walking, running, jumping and controlling your ankle.

They get plenty of work during everyday movement and many exercises, but they can also be trained directly with calf raises and other loaded movements.

They're not just there to fill the gap between your shorts and your shoes.

Do You Need to “Feel” the Correct Muscle?

This needs a little nuance.

Feeling an exercise in the intended muscle can sometimes provide useful feedback.

But you don't need to feel an enormous burn in a muscle for an exercise to be working.

Likewise, feeling another muscle doesn't automatically mean you've performed the exercise incorrectly.

A squat doesn't become ineffective because you felt your glutes more than your quads.

A row doesn't fail because your biceps got tired.

Compound movements involve multiple muscles.

However, unexpected pain or discomfort is different.

If an exercise repeatedly hurts, or you're feeling significant discomfort somewhere you weren't expecting, that's worth investigating rather than blindly continuing.

Should You Train Every Muscle in Every Workout?

You don't have to.

There are lots of perfectly effective ways to organise training.

You could use:

Full-body training

Upper/lower splits

Push/pull/legs

Body-part splits

or countless other arrangements.

For many of my general personal-training clients, though, full-body training works extremely well.

If somebody trains two or three times per week, we can practise the major movements regularly without having to dedicate an entire Tuesday to their chest.

A session might contain:

A squat

A hinge

A push

A pull

A carry

with additional exercises selected around that person's goals.

But that's a programming choice—not a biological rule.

Don't Train Like Someone With Completely Different Goals

There's nothing wrong with looking at how professional athletes or bodybuilders train.

We can learn plenty from them.

But copying their programme doesn't mean you'll get their results.

Their goals, training history, available time, recovery and sometimes entire lifestyle can be completely different from yours.

A competitive bodybuilder might have an excellent reason to dedicate substantial training volume to an individual muscle.

Someone who can realistically train twice per week probably doesn't.

Your training should be built around your goals and your life.

Not somebody else's Instagram account.

The Bottom Line

You don't need to memorise hundreds of muscles to understand strength training.

Start with the major movement patterns:

Push.

Pull.

Squat.

Hinge.

Carry.

Then make sure your programme provides appropriate work for your trunk, grip and any other areas relevant to your goals.

From there, progressively get stronger.

The human body is complicated.

Your training doesn't necessarily need to be.